woody allen

yeah i agree with that.

Everything he does on the screen is therapeutic

get his ass, orson

No truly shy person makes that many movies or wants a stage that badly, bottom line. I feel the same about Louis CK.

I also think “shyness” can be a smokescreen for ppl who do bad stuff to other people — obviously?

"The Chaplin disease" is quite telling. In more ways than one, apparently.

weirdly i think this is acknowledged in the films. annie hall is the story of a young woman who gets into a relationship with an older man who condescends to her -- and who is drawn to her because of his own insecurities, and his sense that she isn't his true peer. and then she outgrows him. by the end she realizes that his "intellectualism" is shallow bitterness, a way for him to feel superior to people who he, deep down, feels inferior to. and he is just left spouting the same pseudo-cynical platitudes that he opened the movie with.

annie is the only character who experiences real growth in the film. she is the actual protagonist. he might be the narrator but he is ultimately a static character, going nowhere, doomed to repeat the same miserable cycle over and over again.

Woody's stand-up persona was very confident in its portrayal of his ostensible weaknessess (if nothing else, he knows how good he is in front of an audience); this was calibrated into much more of the neurotic nebbish by the 1980s films.

--

tl:dr 2 matt

that was his image, I really don't understand the point you're making at all

just saying it was possible for human beings on planet earth born between 1940 and 1980 to encounter his work or existence outside of a 1980s sitcom.

like, the famous Americans who are in movies that you've actually seen* frame his IRL behaviour as wildly inappropriate & controlling overreach, so if that was his image, you can presumably take it as representative. (I took it as exposing the image as a mask for the other behaviour, but either way works.)

If you've leafed through Fatherhood in your own father's hospital room, a copy that someone gave him for his birthday, and it seems like some decent light gags and a bunch of smug fake bullshit telling other ppl how to behave, is it worth reading the whole thing and trying to take it sincerely?

* tbf I did see Leonard Part 6 in the cinema, which didn't sell him as a comedic mastermind



he did commercials but he was known for the Cosby Show!

yeah but if you encounter an American making reference to him on television or standup or sketch comedy or a radio interview or a magazine prose piece through the '90s and '00s, are they recounting the plot of a Cosby Show episode*, or are they saying "THEO, sweaters, PUDDING POP"? (or referring to his standup being influential)

*Soto's post upthread was fascinating because "sweaters / scolding paterfamilias" is pretty much the entire cultural context for ppl who didn't see the programme, ime

xp What does "truly shy" mean, though? I'm shy and I feel like there are all these weird conditions and gradations to my shyness, where you can barely see it in some contexts and then in others it suddenly kicks in and seriously interferes with my life.

If you wanted to put Welles's argument in a less sweepingly negative way, you could say that shyness in company can both mask and trigger a need to be heard and taken seriously in other contexts. Is that always/entirely about being arrogant and egocentric? I doubt it; sometimes people just have something to say. Though I'm sure it's one of those things that's partially true for lots of people. Shyness is very self-focused, after all; you end up thinking a lot about how other people see you.

I think there's room for welles to have been right about allen while being an asshole about it too

weirdly i think this is acknowledged in the films. annie hall is the story of a young woman who gets into a relationship with an older man who condescends to her -- and who is drawn to her because of his own insecurities, and his sense that she isn't his true peer. and then she outgrows him. by the end she realizes that his "intellectualism" is shallow bitterness, a way for him to feel superior to people who he, deep down, feels inferior to. and he is just left spouting the same pseudo-cynical platitudes that he opened the movie with.
― treeship., Tuesday, March 2, 2021

think this is otm

haven't seen Manhattan in forever but my memory of it is that Mariel Hemingway in the end decides what was best for herself and shrugs him off

xp yeah, that's about what I was trying to get at I think

it's definitely a great summation of Allen

xpost sic I get what you're saying but also like the article I posted more people watched the Cosby Show in the US in 86 than lived in the entire UK at the time

I just don't think you can understate how ubiquitous that show was

Dan S at 7:21 2 Mar 21

that Welles quote is a little over the top

haha well it's a quote by Orson Welles so it goes with the territory

Yes there are many facets to shyness (I think there are usually more precise words and shyness is an umbrella term)
That’s why I don’t trust people who use the shyness defense. If you’re only shy when you’re defending your awful behavior, are you shy? No you are slithering out of a tough spot

never got the feeling that Allen was pretending to be shy in any of his films tbh, just insecure

was woody the original fuccboi?

" just don't think you can understate how ubiquitous that show was"

yah and again im not saying anyone *should* have read red flags into it, just that it was possible to build an image of him, *based entirely on American pop culture,* that cast the kindly dad character as somewhere on the spectrum from hypocrite to sinister

like, Allen and CK were pretty open about their creepitude in their work (and only saw the very last straw of creepitude as bad). Cosby seems to have lucked into the sitcom as a cover, and leaned into it once it arrived, but he was also drugging and raping women in the previous 20 years while he was (briefly) doing spoken comedy about drugging and raping women, or starring in a film about an ambulance driver "who drinks alcohol on duty, harasses nuns, behaves brazenly towards practically everybody he meets... (and names co-worker Raquel Welch) "Jugs" for her ample bosom."

None of them really *had* to make up a fake empathetic character to smuggle their behaviour through; fame and power and being male did most of the work already.

Like 80% of Harvey Weinstein's public persona / reported anecdotage was being an intrusive, controlling, destructive creep, trying to take over people's life's work and make it worse with his unwanted intrusions, 19% was being a screaming bully towards people he didn't work with, and 1% people saying what a pleasant relief it was to drink champagne with him if you managed to get your work past him unmolested and it won an award. Then it came out that he acted the same way (but horribly worse) toward women when nobody was around. idk. when you're a star, they let you do it.

I think the two most blatant examples of Allen projecting his insecurities onto others are found in Manhattan: where Keaton's ex- turns out to be Wallace Shawn, whom Allen, when they run into him, instantaneously gets to feel superior to and make jokes about, and then all the carping about other people's pretensions throughout the film, while he gets to swoon over Flaubert and Cezanne and Bergman ("Swedish movies") in his makes-life-worth-living list at the end (making sure to mix in other stuff we recognize as not pretentious).

In his autobio (which I didn't finish, don't worry) Schwarzenegger says that when he moved to NYC in the 1970's his two role models were Woody Allen and Andy Warhol, which is obviously p lol but he also talks about how Allen could dominate a room, how he was immensely secure despite his nebbish persona. So Arnie has his number too, but in an aspirational way.

i don't think the insecurity was fake, just that it wasn't something that made him harmless. to the contrary, it seems to have driven his need to domineer over young women.

in a shocking revelation that upends everything we thought we knew about patriarchy, it turns out nerds can be misogynists too

Whodathought? Now, where's that Frank Zappa thread?

i don't think the insecurity was fake

― treeship., Wednesday, March 3, 2021 7:11 AM (eleven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Allen's entire life has been built around making stories. If there is a person who could pull that kind of stunt is an actor/director.

upfront, I'm going to be clear that I've seen I think 10 of his films…and so I am seeking informed views…

what other artists full stop are there whose entire oeuvre revolves around presenting rewritten iterations of their own lives, and thus defenses of their behavior IRL ? I believe the majority of his films represent his public persona i.e. the way he sees himself, typically involved some other professional pursuit that he considers to be part of the Manhattan/UES milieu to which he is tethered to an obsessive degree… a college professor, a novelist… in these films, he's a neurotic, anxious nerd… but in that he is always the moral victor; the women (or teenage girls) who he seeks see the error of their ways and realize that this little nerd fucks them better than anyone else and is so smart and funny……and the men he is intimidated by initially always realize that he is their superior…and of course, like it is said in the doc, he is grooming the audience re: his preying on teenagers by presenting cute charming versions of such behavior in his films…

are any of these Mary Sues ever shown to have acted in bad faith? Do any ever get their comeuppance? I don't think so but let me know…and seriously, are there tons of other filmmakers or novelists who are so childish that the overwhelming majority of their work is devoted to presenting idealized, heavily defended versions their own lives and behaviors (I guess the Seinfeld was like this)? how many of his films are about something other than his need to compliment himself? It seems that no one has ever been in a position to say to him "this is not a good idea…" his sister must have been the closest but evidently never did…of course he thought he could get away with this shit in 1992…he had encountered very little other than profound ass kissing for the entirety of his adult life…

I also find his version of New York —which is the UES that he as a child wanted to escape to from Coney Island — deeply annoying, as does the impression I have that his cultural interests have not budged since he was fucking, what, 20, 15? Dixieland jazz, european art film, New York sports and the western literary and philosophic canon, mixed and matched over and over…does he ever express interest in anything newer than that, other than fucking females who are decades his junior?

Blue Jasmine is especially annoying because it's supposed to be set in San Francisco but Allen just transplanted NYC to the West Coast, with Bobby Cannavale pretty much doing a 'fuggetaboutit!' kinda thing the whole time

I think the autofiction element of most of his movies is a shitty ripoff of philip roth, who was also a misogynist and a cruel partner and hudband, but one who, to his credit, wasn’t really complimenting himself in these portrayals either. I see allen as a very unsophisticared reader of roth and the movies are like that sensibility shoehorned into the simplistic form of romantic comedies.

It’s like if someone tried to make a version of the brothers karamazov starring mickey mouse and friends, attempting to adapt the themes to that audience

I think you’re right that woody tries to make himself lovable in these films and normalizes his own desire doe young women to boss around. But it is worth noting—maybe—that he doesn’t get the girl in the end of most of these. He is like a stop on their road to self-actualization.

I think the autofiction element of most of his movies is a shitty ripoff of philip roth, who was also a misogynist and a cruel partner and hudband, but one who, to his credit, wasn’t really complimenting himself in these portrayals either.

hence why Deconstructing Harry ranks among his best.

He knew enough about storytelling to disguise the wish-fulfillment aspect, at least a little, add some ambiguity. But that doesn’t discount the way in which the films romanticize himself and the type of heterosexual relationships he preferred.

xps appropo of nothing to trees: i own the english translation of this and it's fun

http://static.wikia.nocookie.net/scrooge-mcduck/images/0/01/Papercutz%27s_First_Page_of_Mickey%27s_Inferno.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000

https://bookriot.com/reading-mickeys-inferno/

uh, here:
http://i.imgur.com/gY2zMhv.png

Lol! That sounds amazing. I have a guilty pleasure interest in “the brick testament,” which is a comic book in which the bible is illustrated with legos

I also have enjoyed woody allen movies fwiw. But they’re not really very original, just entertaining pastiche, which is ok too.

woody allen movies that i think i still like based on my memories of the last time i saw them: Annie Hall, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, Crimes and Misdemeanors... mmmmaybe Purple Roe of Cairo, Sleeper and Alice too.

i loved stardust memories last time i saw it

i think i was in college then though. rented it from the library.

It's the one I tried to watch right after Dylan published her letter, and the misogyny of it is incredible.

I haven't seen Love and Death in ages, but that might be about the safest film of his you can watch now.

Take The Money And Run

So in case anyone else stuck through this doc until the end, thoughts? Frankly IMO this eviscerated each defense point Allen and his defenders have brought up through the years: the Yale clinic 'diagnosis', the polygraph, even the fucking train which Moses was stating a few years ago wasn't there (it is indicated in the initial investigation docs and they showed exactly where it was in relation to where the abuse allegedly happened). I've seen a fair amount of criticism of the documentarians, mainly around their last project (which I still haven't seen, the Russell Simmons one), but that criticism seemed to circle around whether they were sufficiently nice to their interviewee (who was called in by Oprah, and not them, at the last minute). I've seen no substantive take downs of what they've revealed, all of which seems to be fairly factual and damning.

the yale clinic diagnosis thing was the most suspect thing ever. almost unbelievable situation. they had the interviewers destroy their notes, they had woody allen come to do a press conference to reveal that they had decided he was innocent. makes you wonder what other shit was going on over there (or still is?)

The Simmons doc is good

another thing that stuck out to me was the recorded phone conversations: I barely recognized Allen in these recordings, his voice sounded an octive deeper half the time, and none of his mannered stuttering, etc. He sounded downright menacing at times, and at one point sounded ... nuts? drunk? It was in the second episode I think, and he just starting responding to her in some weird, disconnected manner, repeating some words.

If you watch his press conference and every other interview, it seems almost glaringly obvious he's lying. He coughs, for one thing, right before he is asked something direct.

and my take on Moses' flip: I'm guessing he got paid off. Mia was at his first wedding. They have a mothers day card from him to her from not even that long ago. They mentioned his first wife believed Dylan. Wonder what that divorce was like.

How does Mia Farrow come off?

Fine? Like... a loving mother who didn’t really want to do any of this. She certainly doesn’t come across as crazy, manipulative, scheming, or ditzy.

It’s very clear the only reason this wasn’t prosecuted was because the state investigator didn’t want to put dylan on the stand an retraumatize her. He is also clearly haunted by this decision and he apologizes to her for that in the last episode.

I tend to believe the worst of Woody Allen while also believing she was manipulative and scheming. Both things can be true. Does the documentary challenge this?

It’s hard to see how she would be manipulative in this case since there is lots of evidence that she didn’t know that the doctor would call the police; that she wanted to handle everything privately; and she had to be coaxed into even participating in this doc.